Newton Poetry

My roommate has this thing with technology. It freaks him out.

Like when my iMac and my iPhone ring with an iCal alarm at the same time, he gets spooked. Sometimes my iMac G3, running OS 9, will wake up in the middle of the night and start talking in some robotic voice. My roommate said he almost tossed the Mac into the pond next to our apartment.

But now I’m starting to worry.

I gave that Wolfram|Alpha thingy a try the other day, on my iPhone, and got the above message. It addressed me personally, and I freaked out a little.

Now I know my iPhone has my name in it. And I know that the HAL-like graphic invokes some 2001 reference (“What are you doing, Dave?”). Still. It’s a bit creepy to have your phone address you by your first name.

Called it the Uncanny Valley, or call it some robotic defense system that becomes self aware and starts offing humans. Whatever. It’s terrible.

And now Adobe products are figuring things out on their own.

I dig technology. I’ve devoted this blog to a device that reads my friggin’ handwriting. The Newton is pretty smart.

But it doesn’t call me out by name. That’s a step too far.

Lots of good stuff from Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (including a new iPhone 3GS), but the part that caught my eye was the ability of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to recognize Chinese symbols through handwriting recognition on Mac trackpads:

You can now use a Multi-Touch trackpad to draw Chinese characters in your documents. They’ll appear on the screen in a new input window, which recommends characters based on what you drew and lets you choose the right one. The input window even offers suggestions for subsequent characters based on what you chose.

The iPhone had this ability first, but now it’s an OS X-wide feature. Pretty cool.

Us Newton users are always curious to see how Apple uses handwriting recognition in our post-MessagePad world. The technology lives on in Inkwell, but would it be useful to have English handwriting recognition on Mac trackpads?

Tony Kan from My Apple Newton shared his page of free Newton eBooks available for download.

Kan converted many books (“an eclectic mix of spy and war thrillers, science fiction, fantasy and classics”) to the Newton’s easy-to-use eBook format:

Some of them are in the public domain and others are books that I own hardcopies of but they have been scanned so that I can read them conveniently on my Newton…However, be mindful that you should only download and keep the books that are still under copyright if you have already purchased a hardcopy in the past.

After installing a new battery pack in my Newton eMate 300, I wondered about the pack’s abilities: how long did it take to charge? How could I find its exact charge capacity? How long would it take to discharge?

Thankfully, I found a super-useful application (thanks to Tony Kan) to find all this out: Frank Gruendel’s NewtTest.

NewtTest is an all-in-one information source for any Newton ever created, from the OMP to the MessagePad 2100. As Frank says:

NewtTest will only show tests that make sense on the particular machine it is running on (you won’t, for example, find the backlight test on an OMP). Hence it will look different on different Newton models.

Once you install NewtTest on your Newton, you have access to tons of great tidbits of data. From the most detailed, like the above screenshot under “System Info,” to a “Backlight” feature that simply lets you turn your backlight-capable Newton on or off.

For my own use, the “Battery” section showed my eMate’s capacity, temperature, and voltage. It also recognized the type of battery pack I installed as an Apple NiMH rechargeable pack. Gruendel’s attention to detail here is impressive, and much-appreciated.

Another benefit is the “Clock” feature. If you’ve ever had to reset your Newton’s clock (on OS 1.x models) or calendar date (on any Newton), you know how frustrating it is.

NewtTest makes it simple by letting you pick the year first (above) and then worry about the date. Since my eMate was constantly running out of juice, I spent a lot of wasted time resetting the date by scrolling through the months and years (usually starting with 1997). NewtTest’s “Clock” feature becomes a big time saver.

Other “Test Types” in NewtTest, like testing the sounds on your Newton (cuckoo!) and calibrating the digitizer, are so helpful I wonder how I’ve lived without them.

For instance, my eMate’s screen shows a few faded or missing pixels on the right-hand side of the screen. With NewtTest’s “LCD Display” test, I can show a fully black screen, or a series of horizontal lines. It turns out that my eMate has a vertical line of faded pixels running the entire length of the screen. That’s not good news, but it’s worth knowing.

Gruendel has developed a few other applications for the Newton, but NewtTest is so practical that no MessagePad or eMate user should be without it.

Courtesy of maczydeco on Flickr, and used with permission under Creative Commons.

Eckhart Köppen has come through once again for the Newton community with a patch for the 2010 bug.

Köppen released Patch 71J059, a patch for the bug that had Newton users dreading New Year’s Eve (this year and next). This incredible piece of DIY engineering helps extend the life of our MessagePads. And the download-and-install procedure is very simple and straightforward.

While the patch is for MP2100s only, Köppen says, “German and eMate versions are still in the making.”

Earlier this year, many Newton users were affected when a previous 2010 solution went haywire. Since then, Köppen has been working on a solution to both the 2010Fix problem and the 2010 Newton bug.

The 2010 bug only affected Newton OS 2.1 devices, meaning MP100-120 users are safe.

Newton users sang the praises of Köppen’s Patch 71J059 after making the announcement. Köppen is careful to point out, however, that installing the patch is not a risk-free project:

NOTE: THIS PATCH IS PROVIDED WITHOUT WARRANTY. DUE TO THE COMPLEX NATURE OF SYSTEM PATCHES, FAILURE TO INSTALL PROPERLY MAY RENDER THE NEWTON UNUSABLE, RECOVERY REQUIRES A TEMPORARY ROM BOARD SWAP, AND WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF ALL DATA ON THE NEWTON!

But this means that the year 2010 can come and go, and Newton users can still carry their MessagePads with pride (and without resorting to a clumsy solution, like setting the Newton’s date and time to some year in the past).

The project speaks to the resilience of the Newton community (err, cult). With no help from Apple, but tons of help from Newton users, Köppen and others have shown what a dedicated group of hard-core enthusiasts can do.

“I am discovering my job is less about helping people with their computer problems, and more about watching an endless parade of status bars.”

– Thomas Brand, from his amazingly-cool My Newton Blog (and Twitter).

Update: Brand has changed his blog name to, ahem, Egg Freckles. How Newton-riffic is that?

The RetroMacCast team recently aired an interview with Steve Capps, an Apple Fellow, original Macintosh team member, and Newton developer, in episodes 115 and 116.

Capps is one of the genuine Good Guys: decent, hard-working, and has a great way of talking about his work on the original Mac and Newton. He helped work on the Lisa, the Mac’s Finder, the Newton OS 1.0 and 2.0.

He eventually left Apple to work on Windows Active Desktop idea and Microsoft’s Internet efforts. Since then, he’s worked on AliceX – an iPhone version of the only Apple-released game ever available on the Macintosh.

There’s a Fake Steve Capps blog (his real blog, actually), a Steve Capps Day, and a real sense of respect surrounding the guy.

Check out the podcast (iTunes link) for a great look back at the glory days of the Mac and Newton systems, and a super interview with one of the great individuals in Apple history.

I finally updated the Newton Sites page by adding web sites I’ve found through referrals, NewtonTalk, Tony Kan’s My Apple Newton blog, random Google searches, and links provided by current Newton sites.

The eMate 300 popped up more often than not. I think it’s because, now that I have my own eMate, the proto-netbook was my focus for how-to articles and project ideas.

The Salon.com article I added is particularly good because it expresses what a lot of us Newton users feel: our platform died much too soon.

In adding the Geek Techniques wireless eMate breakdown, I also came across a problem – namely, how to categorize all these Newton posts efficiently and logically.

The idea behind my Newton Sites project was to archive many Newton sites that are no longer maintained, and to provide a resource for people who are looking for Newton how-tos and historical information. Now I’ve made it a point to Delicious-ize everything that I come across under the “Newton” tag, and leave the sorting for later.

The problem is, a lot of these web sites fall under multiple categories. I have an “Archive” section, but what happens when that archived page explains a Newton software product? Which do I put it under?

And really, “How-To” could be its own category since most of what I uncovered since the last time I tackled this project fell under that heading. Like some arcane classification czar, or a taxonomist of the Newton, the struggle is in fitting sites in certain silos.

That’s where ideas like tags come in real handy. At Delicious or Flickr, when something falls under multiple categories, you simply add all that apply. A blog post on installing an eMate battery tray could be labeled both “How-To” and “Blogs” under my classification system.

It’s enough to boggle the mind.

So for now, the categories will stay:

• Maintained: sites that are kept up-to-date
• Abandoned: sites that haven’t been touched in years, but still have good Newton info
• Software: repositories of Newton packages, drivers, and emulators
• Blogs: web logs that focus or feature the MessagePad
• Reviews: classic reviews of the various Newton models
• Articles: random reviews, how-tos, and discussions about the Newton platform
• Misc.: the catch-all category.

What we really need is a site or a resource, like the mirrors.unna.org project, that can either host or link to this site list. The problem, however, goes back to my original complaint, which is that many Newton-related links are 404. I found there were so many dead-end links that I got frustrated and built my own resource. That turned into Newton Sites. But maybe someday someone can collect all these great, historical sites and give them their day. My project is simply a hobby.

I’m all for suggestions, so if you find something missing or incorrect, please let me know. Also, there are people way smarter than me when it comes to organizing and classification – so here’s your chance to shine. You’ll get your reward in heaven.

Or, if we ever meet, a beer.

This modest project, combined with Ryan Vetter’s Newton Knowledge Wiki, Morgan Aldridge’s UNNA, and Grant Hutchinson maintaining the NewtonTalk list – along with all those folks still working to maintain and improve our beloved device – should ensure the Newton remains in the public mind for years to come.

“The Newton’s gone, but it looks like, at present, Apple has the most compelling PDA on the market. Go figure.”

– Blake Patterson at Byte Cellar. Blake is co-founder of the excellent iPhone gaming blog, Touch Arcade. Check out my interview with Blake, too.